Hey everyone!
In this months State of the game we want to give you an update on our roadmap, reveal the new planet type and talk a little bit about those "Special weapons" that we mentioned last time around.
Roadmap:
Here is a look at the current roadmap:
We are still targeting the end of April for the release of the High Tech Update but it might slip into May. We still have to do quite a bit of work on it but we are getting there! Also next name for the update after that will be the Victory Update! We won't go into much details here but the headline features will be a new special victory condition, as well as AI opponents + some community features that were requested in the Discord and in the Steam community. The update will also be special because it will be the last update before we leave Early Access! More on that in the coming months but for now let's focus on the upcoming High Tech Update.
High Tech Update:
Last time we mentioned that the update will add a new type of planet and we are happy to finally show it to you:
It's a gas planet! This new type of planet can be found in a new outer orbit of every world. You can't colonize the planet just like every other planet. This will only be possible after reaching Tier 4 citizens. You also can't build regular buildings on those planets. There is only a handful of buildings that can be build in the orbit of the planet such as the Hydrogen Extraction Station. Hydrogen can then be used in Fusion Power Plants to produce energy and Helium and to build interplanetary nuclear missiles. Another difference to normal planets is that your production buildings will require Oxygen to operate which you will have to collect on a regular, ice or desert planet.
You will also be able to keep playing your existing worlds as these planets will be generated retroactively into existing worlds.
This brings us to another new endgame feature that we will be adding with the High Tech Update. Both factions will get a "special weapon" that they can research in the research menu. The military faction will gain access to interplanetary nuclear missiles and the science faction will gain access to an interplanetary laser. Both are very much endgame stuff and they will not come cheap! The laser for example will require Helium to operate and the nukes will require Plutonium from Nuclear Power Planets as well as Hydrogen.
We hope you guys are as excited for the update as we are but there is still a lot to do, implement and test until the update is ready for prime time!
Current state:
QoL and Bug fixes from last SotG:
We were very focused on the next update this month so not much has changed since last time.
- Hotkey to cycle through colonies - Shipped with 0.4.5
Big TODOs:
- Faction flags (No ETA for that yet)
- "Large planets" world type - We are currently investigating if that technically possible or if it will cause any problems / negatively impact the game in any way
- Terraforming - We are trying to add this with the High Tech Update
- Modding support (No ETA for that yet)
- (Multiple star systems) - Maybe after Early Access
Quality of life:
Here is a list of QoL changes that are in the works or on our TODO list:
- Show hotkeys in tooltips
- Auto upgrade mode for the city center
- A research queue / Ability to select a technology to be researched and the system will automatically research each technology towards the target technology
- A world option to increase or decrease the amount of resources generated in if limited resources are enabled
Bugs:
We are not aware of any bugs in singleplayer. Multiplayer is still affected by a couple of desync issues.
- There is a hard to debug desync that can cause colony items to go out of sync and trigger a desync
- There is a very rare bug that can cause multiplayer games to go horribly out of sync without triggering a desync
That is it for this months SotG! As always we love to hear your feedback and thank you for your support!
TeamJA